THEORY: minor quirks (was: S. Australian (was: Re: Gz^rod|in))

>I don't know -- my impression is that language is fairly tolerant of
>minor quirks. Quite a lot of people have obligatory [x] in _loch_ and
>no other words (Bach, maybe), for example.

But that's hardly a *rule*. If they learnt that _Bach_ is /bax/ in German
they might easily enough begin to pronounce it /bA:x/ (or maybe /b^x/?
BTW some varieties of Swedish has [a:] -- opposed to [a] and [A:] -- only
in a few words of expletive or expressive character. It is hardly a matter
of an extra phoneme; rather these words are marked as belonging to the
class of expletive/expressive words where the long open-syllable allophone
of /a/ is front rather than back -- a pragmatically/indexically conditioned
allophone, if you will accept such a thing! Examples: if you say [gA:len]
rather than [ga:len] you are gravely declaring that someone is clinically
nuts rather than just wild or stupid, or if you say [fA:n] you are actually
talking about the Devil rather than just swearing. I heard some Northern
England accents have a similar distinction between ['fUkIn] and ['f^kIn].
/BP
B.Philip Jonsson <mailto:bpj@...>bpj@netg.se
<mailto:melroch@...>melroch@my-deja.com
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